Academia: Try a Little Tenderness

Thursday's Child Has Far to Go

A while back, I had a few things to say about the case of Mackenzie Fierceton’s treatment by the administration at the University of Pennsylvania, but I primarily tried to apply my thoughts to the entirety of selective admissions everywhere, as well as hiring in higher education. I wasn’t sure how to judge the relative merits of Fierceton’s narrative versus what Penn and the Rhodes Scholarship had come to believe about her except to say that I thought Penn’s interrogation of Fierceton was unseemly and hard to justify in the context of how Penn and many other institutions solicit biographical information from applicants for admission and job candidates in order to decide who gets to win a scarce and coveted place.

Well, I think that even more today, but I’m no longer feeling any uncertainty about whose story is correct after reading Rachel Aviv’s long and careful investigation of the case in the New Yorker. Penn got it badly wrong and their attack on Fierceton was a deep violation of their declared commitments to the success and welfare of their students.

I’m not alone in coming to that conclusion, so let me once again raise a bigger issue about all of higher education using this case as a point of entry.

Why don’t institutions of higher education apologize for screwing up?

I’m not talking here about the more complicated business of apologizing for being involved in major episodes of past discrimination and oppression, though I think that’s also something that shouldn’t be as hard as it seems to be. Every time we talk about being more inclusive or committed to diversity today should be a time where we remind our students and alumni of our failures to do so even in the quite recent past.

What I mean more is that institutions and their leaderships should be as matter-of-fact about acknowledging and repairing serious mistakes of judgment as we expect or demand others to do so within institutions.

Think about it: this is one more unintentional lesson that universities teach to students about power and responsibility, namely, the more power you have, the less you have to own up to your responsibility for its misuse. Even when a university does not have an honor code per se, the student handbook often lays out specific expectations for student conduct and maintains some form of quasi-judicial system for dealing with cases of misconduct. When faculty work with students in courses, failure and error are laid out relatively mercilessly—when a student who has bombed two exams or failed to turn in work comes to see me, I can be kind or unforgiving in my own reaction to that but one thing we’re not in doubt about is the fact that the test was failed or the work is not complete. The only way a student can escape having to own up to that is by ghosting a professor entirely and ignoring requests from deans or peer advisors, and even that’s just delaying the day when the transcript becomes a concrete archive of a mistake or a shortcoming.

Faculty have far more ways to avoid responsibility for errors of judgment, but many professors I know will forthrightly acknowledge to students when an assignment went wrong or a unit or section of a course didn’t really work out. Many of us will openly acknowledge to colleagues when a proposal or idea wasn’t such a hot idea. (I once advocated a different approach to the ‘culminating exercise’ in my department and everyone went along with it. It was a flaming car wreck and I knew it while we were stuck in the middle of student presentations, so I said so to everybody then and later.)

Disciplines air out their controversies in public, and rethink their previous theories, arguments and claims through scholarship and in open conversation. We expect, if sometimes with unwarranted optimism, that a researcher whose experimental designs or data turn out to have serious problems will acknowledge those issues and do their best to adapt their work for the next try. We expect accountability of various kinds in scholarship and in governance.

It gets trickier, obviously, when the consequences of acknowledging error are potentially the loss of a job or in the case of students, being expelled. It’s true at that point that everybody tends to lawyer up and hunker down. And what is public or not public is determined at times by legal constraints and compliance with regulatory norms that transcend and transect higher education.

But most university administrations do not even engage in the basic conversation about error and misjudgment. The best you can expect most of the time is a policy change that typically comes months or years after a serious mistake where the mistake itself is not acknowledged or referenced except in the vaguest of ways.

It matters when the values and purpose of an institution are fractured as you approach its top levels of authority and responsibility. It is at the least corrosive when highly visible errors, whether on a matter of general policy or in some specific case, are not even acknowledged at all, let alone discussed with any degree of transparency. And it feels like a kind of malpractice when an institution that has harmed a student or an employee never has to say so in any way whatsoever, unless that’s one of the agreed-upon outcomes at the end of a lawsuit. (It’s pretty striking that as of today, March 31, even Penn’s student newspaper hasn’t covered or mentioned the New Yorker story—whether that’s inattention or discomfort because there’s a lawsuit, I’m not sure.)

That’s where the reluctance centrally stems from, of course: “on the advice of counsel”. Institutional leadership in higher education is loyal to the endowment before it is loyal to the values of academia; fiduciary duty is the first and last of the commitments that govern what can and will be said or not said. That is becoming a more and more acute limitation, however, as the overall logic of asset capitalism and financialization becomes a stronger and stronger principle of institutional authority across the whole of society, not just in higher education. Your principal overrides your principles; your principal is the entirety of your principles.

If we’re talking something as abstract and debatable about the use of endowment funds to leverage social or political changes in the wider world, maybe so. But if we’re talking being so protective of the endowment that we can’t say when we’ve done the wrong thing to a student under the protection of the institution, it’s another thing entirely. It feels to me that there are so many occasions where students leave an encounter with administrative authority or oversight at a university feeling diminished, hurt and unheard where that could have been avoided through some plain talk but also some honest acknowledgement of those feelings. Fierceton is the absolute worst-case scenario as far as that goes, but there are deep wells of bitterness and alienation out there to consider.

Maybe Penn will have the good grace and common sense to settle up in this case now that the balance of the evidence is so overwhelmingly tilted against their approach to this student and this case, but I doubt anything like an apology or even an acknowledgement will follow. The best anybody can hope for will be the usual: a largely internal, opaque process of policy review that in five or six years produces some form of new procedure that is narrated as an improvement to procedures that are described as already sufficient. Even when we’re supposedly getting better in this business, we never say that it’s because we used to be worse.